Advances in Social Science and Culture 
ISSN 2640-9682 (Print) ISSN 2640-9674 (Online) 

Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc 

15 
 

Original Paper 

Hypermodern Documentary Context: A Kernel of Authentic 

Choices 

Jarmo Valkola 

 

Received: December 12, 2022   Accepted: January 12, 2023    Online Published: January 26, 2022 

doi:10.22158/assc.v5n1p15        URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/assc.v5n1p15 

 

1. Cognitive and Phenomenological Challenges 

In hypermodern documentary, the rhythms, and intonations of images, sounds and speech of everyday 

life are usually inhabited and pervaded by immersive and reflective traces of the past, which influences 

the present and points out to the future. The mental functioning of thinking and reasoning are 

mechanisms participating in this atonement of social, psychological, and cultural framework. They are 

felt as social functions of our history and as paraphrased fragments and sources of material perception 

and withdrawn consciousness. The constitutive contingency of the hypermodern stance of documentary 

discourse is concerned with the philosophical domains about the paradigmatic state and status of 

documentary in our times. 

Nowadays it is not always easy to differentiate personal experience from the mediating technologies 

that have reconstituted and irradiated both personal and collective experiences. In this regard, media 

technologies of communication correspond to our somatic channels. Obviously, in the case of sight, the 

medium is visual and in the case of hearing, the medium is sound. These are the two sensory channels 

thought to be the most consequential for thinking. In thinking about language, the matter is different, 

because there is no single sensory channel corresponding to and possibly inspired by it. Language can 

be spoken in which case it is heard or written in which case it is seen. So, language is not so much a 

medium of perception but of representation, and a medium in which we often speak of the visual arts as 

different media like painting, drawing, and sculpting. Whether or not language is not merely an 

inventory of the various items of experience which seem relevant to the individual, it is also a 

self-contained, creative symbolic organisation. And this organisation not only refers to experience 

largely acquired without its help but defines the experience for us through reason of its formal 

completeness, and because of our unconscious projection of expectations in the field of experience 

(Sapir, 1931, p. 74). (Note 1) Later, this idea was developed into the Whorfian hypothesis that language 

moulds sthinking. Of course, it might be necessary to point out that thinking is susceptible by language, 

which itself adapts to thought and action. 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

16 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

The embedded connotation of an interior world comes close to these perceptive embodiments, which 

exist in time. (Note 2) Impression or “trait saillant”, as Henri Thulié recognised, to understand a 

physiognomy well, one must render the impression that one has when on sees it. There are always 

conspicuous features in a face or a costume that are immediately striking. (Note 3) Following the same 

instruction, impressive, significant audiovisual details form the kernel of documentary discourse. This 

similar ideation provides the needed links between early fragmentations of impressionist, figurative 

instalments of painterly dimensions, and they go along with attributes of hypermodern theorisation, and 

are linked to a fulfilment of highly complex exchange of the acknowledged matter that implies the 

complicity of reading modes and interpretative strategies behind hypermodern illustration. Therefore, 

the further combined use of the cinematic, the pictorial, and the architectural unites all these different 

approaches to favour the durational quality of the works. On the pictorial framing level, the 

contemplative, slowly appearing modifications hold the images in duration, between the photographic 

parameter of stillness, and the cinematic prediction of the movements of the performers, and the 

movements of the camera. We do not perceive time in the images as such, but mostly in unique flashes 

and changes of proceedings. The viewer’s increasingly delicate consciousness moves along this 

continual stream of time inside the narrative rhetoric, and the illustrated stillness of individual images 

can morph into an eloquently mannered artistic concoction of filmic qualities.  

The audiovisual flow in the films of Alan Berliner, Chris Marker and Pirjo Honkasalo solicits deep 

attention, involving concentration on a single image, partly ignoring outside stimuli, and preferring the 

frothing tributary of images and sounds. This sort of ‘synthetic’ approach needs the viewer’s capability 

to be concentrated and indivisible on this hypersensitive flux of events. We are not leaping from one 

object to another in a state of hyperattentive surfing, as we are ensuring an incisive level of situation 

and a foreboding of future views and professed expectations related to each other. This happens with 

the joy of encapsulating the time at hand. Moreover, we are favouring a hypothetical sense-intuition of 

indelible phenomenology as an integral scientific explanation that is based on the viewer’s active 

proficiency and precision for observation to be present during these instances. On many occasions this 

concentration creates a fantastic, stylised world, in which reality and imagination merge, but which is 

still essentially real and true. Often in cases like these, the art of cinema is revealed through the realism 

of what happens in front of the camera; “performance” is anathema to cinematic truth (Isaacs, 201, p. 

162). Many phenomenal functions are dependent on mental representations: we must identify targets 

through the generic and other information stored in our memory. Recognition of this might vary from 

amazingly simple cases into complex ones.  

In art, one example would be the recognition of a Rembrandt painting. This sort of identification is 

always determined by the past: to recognise something we must notice the structural similarities 

between the actual information, and the information of some earlier moments. For example, the alleged 

cathartic effect of the past on cognitive processes is an overly complicated issue, which cannot be 

construed just through information storage. For instance, in Marker’s films, this means different levels 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

17 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

of outlooks that coexist in his films, providing a spatial and temporal outlining which offers relations 

between contemporary and past circumstances. In general learning, there is a close addition and 

dialogic interaction between experience and earlier understanding. The recognition of single objects 

depends on the perception of specific characteristics and textures. In everyday experience, all these 

three forms and systems of perception will function smoothly together. All this calls for thinking about 

the pictorial qualities of the image and its perception, all the different theories and scientific research 

approaches, and what possibilities they have opened in creating future skylines in this field. A broader 

view of pictorial perception can see these different approaches complementing each other, helping us to 

have a better understanding of the whole process. There is a defined multiplicity of questions to be 

answered. For example, Gestalt psychology connotes that perception goes out immediately towards 

comprehensively abstract patterns, the so-called Gestalt. In this kind of thinking, concrete perception 

comes before the awareness of generalised abstract Gestalt. (Ehrenzweig, 1993, p. 18)  

The perceptual laws and other Gestalt psychological principles can help and guide us on how to 

organise perceptions into unified schemes and objects. The perceptual laws describe the effects of 

explicitly innate and exceedingly early learned schemes on the organisation of perception. Gestalt 

psychologists thought that these organising principles had a physiological basis, so they would be 

innate ways of organising perception.
 
(Note 4) As a consequential criticism of these views, we can 

connote that we are alleged to set in and define the condition of these conceptualizations more exactly, 

pointing out to the thoughts around these issues, notifying the unused potentials of narratological 

hybridity, new models and other structural devices that are essential ingredients of our approach. 

If we think that there are innate and learned strategies, we can see the unification of many perceptions, 

although our experiences and interpretations of them might be quite different in tone, but still in the 

background there is common information which has been picked. from the same targets. Accordingly, 

we have perceptual and conceptual hypotheses of the world; they are different and might work on 

different timescales. The innate psychological schemes occasionally seem flexible. In the studies 

concerned with complex image transcriptions, there is a perspective in which the primary organisation 

of perception might happen in several ways. So, the innate schemes are not always stiff but can produce 

fluctuations of different shapes on the same material basis. Different perceptions are consequences of 

different schemes that will change during a lifetime, and in the perception of art it seems by 

comparison that the same work of art will look different when viewed during transitional periods of life. 

Perception functions remarkably quickly because unexpected events do happen. Thus, reality is made 

by private hypotheses of perception, and shared hypotheses of conception. Visual and pictorial models, 

descriptions, and representations are partly learned because they are based on earlier experiences. All 

learned schemes are not modes or representations because they can deal with the ways and principles of 

perception. The different visual models, mindfully detailed delineations, and conceptual representations 

are linked easily with the basic system of perception. Circumstantial phenomena may be invested here 

through an expectant flash of glances in relation to the overall schematic and cognitive mapping that is 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

18 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

open to associations while also recording subjective professions.  

Film/body/architecture: a haptic dynamics, a phantasmatic structure of lived space and lived narrative; 

a narrativised space that is intersubjective, for it is a complex of socio-sexual mobilities. Giuliana 

Bruno (2002, p. 65) 

Films from Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash Lucien Castaig-Taylor, 2009) with its intense sights and sounds 

of sheep amid the high Plains of the Rocky Mountains; Être et avoir (To Be and to Have, Nicolas 

Philibert, 2002), with its patient immersion in the day-to-day life of a rural schoolteacher and his pupils; 

and one of the most inspiring works of this kind, Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982), itself a radical 

revision of the city symphony films of the 1930s., all attest to the ability of the documentary to speak 

about the world poetically and movingly, as well as politically and motivationally. Bill Nichols (2016, p. 

86) 

These glimpses of perceptual variance insist on engaging the eye of the viewer to transcribe 

documentary like expression, passages of momentary ocularcentrism, concentrated eyesights, in which 

the camera notices the small gestures and their piecemeal appropriation to filmic ends. The dominant 

accents of social contexture, as well as poetics of cinematic representation are at stake here along with 

performative and audiovisual powers of documentary to address elementary perspectives of our lives. 

The films addressed here come up with essential aspects of emotional charge and other evident 

engagements, or disengagements, and techniques of persuasion to convey their messages in an orderly 

and comprehensible way. These figural modes of documentary are modernist practices and fusions 

within the capacity to create discrete rhetorical attempts in depicting the ramifications of documentary.  

 

2. The Ethos of Documentary 

In documentary, narrative structures can reshape the spaces they depict, and create historical discourses 

by providing images and sounds that make historical and cultural domains openly visible in accounting 

for the everyday experiences of people. The memory questions are usually related to these frames of 

mind, offering rare seconds of delight in depicting the peculiar features of the world. It is in these 

specific terms and attested preconditions that various documentary forms can be exemplified. In some 

cases, documentaries are dealing with “image architecture” that consists of an attempt to give “form” to 

the images. Documentary modes allow these modulations and viewpoints to exist and affect the 

audience. It is a way to give space to images and sounds that have an original form. The temporal 

nature of the narrative becomes essential, since in many documentary films the seconds of waiting and 

patient observation are crucial and constructive. 

Aside from a general contextualisation of scholarly investigation on cinema, the discussion here points 

toward a deepened account of the promises and settled positions of filmic interpretation and 

understanding from the idea of cognitive and, more specifically, phenomenological intentions to 

reconsider and deepen some standpoints of controversy that may increase and process our 

comprehension of filmic narration and its response among the audience. For instance, in art, images are 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

19 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

focal points of persuasive communication and mediation, and they combine all media forms. Thinking 

about the image and its perception, while also considering different approaches and theories, both 

transcriptional and scientific, will help us view new horizons in the field. Cognitive and 

phenomenological relations and viewpoints become essential. Through this kind of initial and partly 

clandestine explanation, we can describe our target points from inner and outer angles. We can also 

dialogically relate our viewpoints with modern traditions of thought and philosophically and 

scientifically relevant themes. (Note 5) Modern documentary doctrine employs a wide variety of 

methods and methodologies. To guarantee a methodologically logical and consistent analysis of 

hypermodern audiovisual culture, it is needed to comprehend and conceptualise the historical and 

cultural appropriation of cinema. The purely scientific method of documentary doctrine relies, however, 

on the large-scale testing of hypotheses and using experimentation. For instance, the scientifically 

factual study of memory has a long history, starting in the year 1885 when German psychologist 

Hermann Ebbinghaus started his tests. This early, laudable work has since then demonstrated the 

flexibility of memory issues, and what can be accomplished when a researcher is totally dedicated to 

the work. Nowadays, we can see more clearly the different functions of memory and our willingness to 

fill in memory gaps and our recollection of past events. This will also help researchers to appropriate 

and develop better theories around these subjects. Our audiovisual perception becomes a partly 

concrete and partly virtual perspective through which we can look at films from our current viewpoint 

that is part of our timely existence. We are arranging a historically lighted tableau. Our relation to 

history becomes a meditative practice that gives observational possibilities to comprehend and 

re-interpret views and visions from this angle.
 
(Note 6) 

The objective is to conceptualise these matters, and, in an abundance of ways, this is an archaeological 

map, which in consonant with these and other precisions will help us to demarcate more intensively 

what documentary theory, philosophy and aesthetics truly means, and to understand the challenging 

nature of this phenomenon. It will also help us to situate cognitivism in a historically specific resonance, 

and in relation to other similar phenomena in media history laced with a specific concentration on 

challenges concerning media and art edification. This is both a theoretical and practical challenge since 

we are dealing with an interest in mapping transnational networks of different influences in terms of the 

narrative rhetoric and audiovisual stylisation that has existed but also transformed through time. This 

shaping of the persistence of forms and traditions is affecting our global mediascape constantly, 

creating various challenges through an increased circulation of images and sounds. This evolution can 

be depicted from several media educational frames and viewpoints offering new insights to the 

questions raised. In this context, our media pedagogical stance would serve to demystify these 

viewpoints and create perennial criticism toward these questions. This is no simple representation of 

these matters, but mostly a wide and complex discourse to reveal the historical, aesthetic, and other 

values concerned here. The ethos of our initial target is to identify more precisely these traditions and 

more contemporary strategies that have emerged at the end of the twentieth century, the new modes, 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

20 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

and envisages of thinking that have formed and modulated original typologies inside the whole media 

circle. In the late-twentieth-century documentary, hypermodern features are already present in the form 

of various accents, gaining further prominence and significance. After 2000, the hypermodern 

phraseology appropriates a more representational, figurative, and tangible presence on the level of 

documentary discourse, featuring also perceptive, more far-reaching, and even scientific intentions and 

repercussions of representation, as some films set out to describe and recite the transitional points and 

climaxes of history, and its epic contours of momentariness. In this pictorial mode of storytelling, 

documentaries focus on the sketched representation of the tentative dispositions embodied in the 

phenomenal attention between the figural landscape and the personified existence of social actors.  

The historicist analysis is useful in relation to media edification challenges that evolved around 

concepts of visible evidence of the alleged authenticity of images in the age of digital media 

communication where truthfulness accordingly acquires new forms. These discourses are also related to 

the certainty and appropriateness of moral and ethical questions concerning the encounters between 

film and media apparatuses. The needed agenda allegedly sets up a tension of a subsequent idea of 

metaphysical perspective on ethics. In the documentary, it is centred on the question of objectivity, 

precisely addressing whether ethical predicates represent real properties of an external reality or merely 

apparent properties that owe their existence to the perception, emotion or thought of those who describe 

them. Regardless of approach to these matters, the documentary frame generally highlights valid 

argumentation, and conclusions of judgments that have an intrinsic value and are conundrums 

explicable as complexes of ostensibly empirical properties. Investigations into the nature of 

psychological phenomena are essential to documentary ethics. For a cinematic enactment of the 

documentary discourse with all its subtexts, the discussion is inherent in further, suggestive presence of 

documentary forms and their developmental unfolding. 

Usually, these matters are explicable through reasoning. There is a need to create and establish a 

directive and argumentative logic that borders between objective and subjective approaches challenging 

dominant discourses inside the collective mediascape of different phenomena. Our interdisciplinary and 

comparative approach exists in a variety of epistemological and other debates around these issues. 

General questions of the formal modes of art and their overlapping dimensions will clear further 

inferences and ameliorate the continuities between several different embodiments of art, largely the 

intertwined attachments and linkages between different media forms of our hypermodern spectacle. 

(Note 7) These larger issues may be tackled more productively if viewed within the broad parameters 

of cultural dimensions rewritten and constructed as essential connections with audiovisual aesthetics. 

The programmed outcome can also suggest a substitution in succession when thinking about the mode, 

form, and style of documentary in accordance with its accent on general theoretical viewpoints, 

symmetries of bodies, and subjects of social setting. 

Audiovisual Ethnography: Chris Marker’s Hypermodern Setting of Sunless (Sans soleil, 1982) 

The filmic experience of memory is alternately reconfigured, partly socially constituted and adjusted by 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

21 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

a will and a meditative consciousness as an integral source for the cinema’s silent evocation and 

melancholic account of states of acquired existence. The many-faceted experience of memory (public 

and psychic) brings in traces that might have been partly lost in the continuity and discontinuity 

between memory and history. The experience of the past can resort to a shifting field of relations and 

invoke a sense of the range of technical possibilities of polyphonic montage. Or maybe we can situate 

ourselves in the middle of the phenomena and mediate in the same way as the French visionary and 

far-sighted filmmaker Chris Marker (1921-2012) did through his films, rejecting the idea of history as a 

‘mirror’ of the course of events. Marker implied instead that the epistemology of writing and the 

compositional semantics of rewriting history does not simply record or reproduce events as they were 

but gives form to, and perpetually transmogrifier, those events. (Note 8) Marker’s work is intricately 

connected to the integral question of montage in cinema and, simultaneously, it is preoccupied with the 

very logic of historical continuity. 

Through his dialectical, prefilmic montage of images and sounds, he develops variable logics, which 

occasionally, may be at work within even a single scene or image. It generates a high degree of 

semantic instability, with the result that is an apparent assertion of single images and sequences become 

contrapuntal and acquiring multiple significance and distinct resonances on different planes of 

explanation as the narrative achieves further meanings. In Marker’s world, the spatial resonance and 

complicated strategy of figuration of acousmatic world of sound creates the pictorial depth and 

evocative completion of the image. The spatial representations are arguments of the internal and 

external codes of cinematic landscaping in order to control the overall fashioning and refashioning of 

the facilities. The perception can be mobile and organised according to some specific adjustments what 

follow Marker’s premises and offer more or less treated parallels between the cinematic, architectural 

language of the film. 

Many of these edits are structured around the embodied interplay of motion and stillness, the basic 

rhythms of cinema, bringing in the intention of temporal passing. Time relates to virtual perception and 

to the experience of the images. Photographic stillness and cinematic movements are steps into a 

hypermodern setting of affairs since they activate the phenomenology of perception and articulate and 

imitate the apparent desire to produce pictorial portrayals of the depicted events. In this regard, 

Marker’s work can be situated between still photography and cinema because of the application of 

meaningful images and montage-juxtapositions, and the usage of time as a discrete and manoeuvrable 

phenomenon. Sunless contains the hypermodern variability of textures, being an example of ‘classified 

realism’. Marker explores changing social range of oppositions between different countries and 

continents, while, for instance, Berliner’s and Guzmán’s works are investigations into more personal 

and more geographically restricted surroundings, and Marker’s way of utilising transcultural 

experiences brings forth a sort of levelling affect, a collateral kind of experience of the pictorially 

illuminated everyday reality in the territory of audiovisual culture. (Note 9) 

In considering Marker’s pictorially charged universe, the spectator is shuttled back and forth between 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

22 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

different postures of the pre-industrialised landscape of Africa and the post-industrialised economy of 

Japan. Through the rhythmic counterpointing, she becomes aware not only of the disparities between 

the two, but also of the persistence of frameworks of thinking and cultural appropriation that link these 

permeated places and spaces together. These patterns of thinking are ultimately utilised in the film as a 

way of critiquing and challenging Western ideologies, in particular the metaphysics of “presence” in 

Western thought, concerned with its privileging of what is spoken over what is left unsaid. Pictorially, 

many images speak for themselves needing no further comment and, especially in this regard, Marker’s 

film comes close to pictorial understanding, including long sequences of sounds and images that mirror 

the cineaste’s comprehension of specific still/movement aesthetics to emphasise seemingly 

contradictory views and perspectives. (Note 10) These references establish counterpoints complicated 

by the anecdotal representation of the proceeding narration. 

Recognising the “truth” of an event always exceeds the documented fact. Marker’s attempt to locate the 

contributory subjects of intimation and association, whether these subsume personal, social, ideological, 

emotional, philosophical, moral, ethical, cultural, or ethnographical dimensions, is worked out through 

a metaphorical play of direct disparities and oppositions that include the spectator in the very definition 

of the conferred meaning itself. Marker’s “associative hypermodern frame” offers a nuanced, 

pictorially multivalent spatial and temporal structure through editing and gives an audiovisually 

palpitating experience and a conceptual description of matters. The French cineaste produces an event 

resulting from the intersection of the everyday and the modern, and a convergence of various and 

integral filmic forms (stillness, animation, movement, frame-based aesthetics of prefilmic montage and 

hypermodern framing) that takes place across the suavity of the lines marked by the simultaneity of 

reflection and a sense of rhetoricity of history and memory, manifested in resonations on the advance of 

digital technology. 

However, one of the most schematically offered propositions from Marker’s angle emerges from the 

investigation of film’s valence to work as an audiovisual ethnography concerned with the depiction of 

an arc of a privileged universe of places and spaces in the narrative. acknowledges its funnelled biases 

and constructiveness as a systematic and open-ended analysis, especially in Lipovetsky’s underlining of 

the ‘social and historic basis’ of the camera-based audiovisual process. In some cases, documentary 

discourse can be underlined by an incentive of a quest, probing, and testing concerns over social and 

historic realms of representation, which is usually explained as a filmic figuration and a context that 

foresees an explication of the central placement of predominant themes and leitmotifs. These appear as 

constant references and points of reflection between past, present, and future – a context in which 

narrative figuration is highly appreciated. (Noe 11)  

The narrative connotation of the represented images depends a lot on the commentary. While 

appropriating the medial representations of the inescapable influence of the enunciator’s delineation of 

these situations, there lies an echo of the idea according to which Marker’s hypermodern echoes can be 

understood on two levels: on the one hand, regarding narration, which is constructed by means of the 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

23 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

constant interplay between fictional strategies and documentary contexts; on the other, regarding and 

funnelling the conferred historical meaning of the representation, which works more as connoted than 

revealed by the narrator’s imagistic field of perception. This includes footage of the wing of a 

contemporary jet flying high above Africa, and dogs trailing across the waterline of a sandy beach. In 

diametrical turn and following this, there is an appearance of a striking overhead shot of desert dunes; 

the surface of which is caressed as a far more contingent emblem, resembling the illuminative patterns 

of the waves in the previous shot. In the closing moment of the sequence, there is another overhead 

shot, which contains the raised and intent gaze of an African woman linking her powerful, close-up 

steering to the perspective of the spectator. The pictorial freeze-framing of her face both recalls and 

links to other overlapping sequences in which Marker focuses on the reciprocal interchange of gazes 

between subject (cameraman) and object (those whom he films) and brings the convoluted interplay of 

images of stillness and motion to a temporary halt.  

The camera is often a visible catalyst and a phenomenal presence of the dissecting gaze that one might 

imagine. The camera does not need to be turned on or even in place for the inspecting gaze to exist; 

merely its potential to exist might have this effect.
 
(Note 12) Expressing the same concern as a 

metacinematic work, Marker’s documentary echoes the aesthetic and moral t́ruth’ of hypermodern 

prescription concerning the role of present-day technology and its aspirations, by and large the way 

they affect our perception of the past. The “reality” domain has moved to a collateral level, and a 

peculiar tone of reality is everywhere, overlaid on top of the representation. For Marker, the mythology 

of the image represents his phenomenological and metaphysical intertextuality of solving artistic 

dilemmas. Some of his views might be a bit uncomfortably limited in their overall ramifications, 

recording mainly an artistic voyage, in which parts are construed to produce a whole that is something 

more meaningful than its parts. (Note 13) The option is specific in connection with the overall 

contingency of Marker’s oeuvre. 

 

3. Narrative Connotations: Metaphors of the Real 

Marker’s editing-scheme in the Tokyo-cityscape sequence of Sunless, its creation of temporally abrupt 

and constantly shifting quantities of views from street level to rooftop, confers a slight sense of 

compelling vocalization between stillness and movement, and by animating reconstructions of the 

images in the film’s sequence at the Tokyo-subway, camerawork re-creates an effect of evanescent 

glances scanning the city for its signalized signs. The ramifications of cinematography immediately 

create a kind of moving camera poetry or stilling of the image. These images shuttle back and forth in a 

rapid swap of succession, some immediately decipherable, some less so, with little in the way of 

guidance for the viewer. It is how Marker pictorially takes hold of both the feel of exhilaration and 

seductive allure that the predictable rendezvous with the city provides, and the genuine and strangely 

manifested sense of fragmentation, illegibility, repudiation, and disunification. Tracking images of 

crowds and assortments of people descending the stairs of the subway, the explicit commentary 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

24 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

connotes that the city should be deciphered like a complicated proscenium of a moody “musical score”, 

one in which “one could get lost in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of detail”. The 

city’s pictorial form is always therefore on the brink of formlessness and actual alternation. Marker 

indelicately draws out the sense-instinct of disarticulation by way of allowing assertive juxtapositions 

and the significance of something that is displayed. In general, matters of architecture and audiovisual 

design have shaped the history of cinema. In cinematic narration, things are framed for viewing, and 

assembled as a part of the spectacle. This has to do with the atmospheric presence and change of 

cinematic architecture, moving between interior and exterior spaces. The items on display are ordered, 

partly symmetrically arranged as sequences through spatial structures, and finally assembled as parts of 

the narrative chain. The history of cinema shows how stories were developed in shaping various views 

through the processes of montage for imaginatively fascinated spectatorship. In a hypermodern style, 

cinema’s ever-ended capacity to transcend the compact limitations of temporal and spatial dimensions 

is at play in enriching metaphorical picture-changes, and compositional reframing, as well as 

concretely moving from one part of the city to the next, he classifies and catalogs the clash of 

developmental references and quotations of the architecture and public works adorning the streets of 

Tokyo. Occasionally awkward outlooks testify to a structural affinity between the hypermodern code of 

narrative and the way it is used as the creation of atmosphere feeding the overall mood. In one of the 

most revealing of these poignant indicators, and one which creates an extended impression of historical 

comprehension, density and high-concept perseverance, Marker films the statue of a Buddha in a 

cemetery overlooking the network of train lines that form the city’s nerve centre. Marker seems to think 

that we need a new role for the imagination in everyday life. The atmospheric charge of this expression 

is wider than imagined. 

The inclusion of attributes of association is typical for Marker’s cinematic logic, which is alleged to 

dissolve and further develop its aligned mimesis. This recurrent reproach for new combinations of 

thinking and a wealth of narrative solutions replicates and establishes a hypermodern range and 

classification of accomplished ideas. A means of theoretical intention and sufficient explanation is 

provided as well when the cineaste consequently transcribes and manifests the audiovisual world in 

front of him. It forms an iconic modeling of narration, and a hypermodern ascribing of our existence 

and history in order to discuss and comprehend the valuable merits and limitations of more 

contemporary artistic and cinematic theories. The film’s strangeness in its own time comes straight 

from its unlikeness to familiar filmmaking. Marker invokes the queues of cinematic concepts 

characterising his ‘drama’ to be unfolded in several acts. The grand cultural and historical movement 

stands beside his aspirations, offering a second variant of the spectacle. This all forms a phenomenon of 

defining attributes, thereby creating a distinctive position of narrative rhetoric, moving continually back 

and forth between various landmarks. It is a celebration of 20
th

 century magnifications and answers that 

are exposed in continuing enactments. In Marker’s hypermodern kingdom of filmic magic, the 

elementary scale of matters is overwhelmingly assertive, and besides Sunless, it is expressed in films 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

25 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

like Koumiko Mystery (Le Mystère Koumiko, 1965), If I had Four Camels (Si j’avais quatre dromadaires, 

1966), The Train Rolls On (Le Train en marche, 1971), The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Singer (La 

Solitude du chanteur de fond, 1974), A Grin Without a Cat (Le fond de l’air est rouge, 1977), The Last 

Bolshevik (Le Tombeau d’Alexandre, 1992), just to name a few.  

 

3. Phenomenological Realism 

In a hypermodern documentary or, in Marker’s case. an audiovisual poem and a filmic “Gobelin of 

visual parameters”, the narrative may undertake a sensitively formalised approach and heightened 

quality concerning other levels of representation, with a more downright use of narrator’s field of 

perception, which repeatedly questions and refers the idea of temporal switches of our time and 

minutely records the aspirations and smallest visual details of action in these points in time of assuring 

presence. This sort of accurate documentation is a very typical feature of Marker’s oeuvre, promoting 

his exceptional accuracy of clinging into scanning momentums and experiences that echo the 

worldview of a traveler who turns his memoires into a literary invocation of notions and anecdotes, and 

further into an audiovisual form of spectacle that uses all the possible links related to our perceptive 

undercurrents. It features a phenomenological form of realism and address that is quite difficult, almost 

impossible to determine in all its ramifications and discursive spheres. The traveler embodies and 

engraves a decisive difference, and through the process of narrating also meditates it. This all features 

an established mode of communication involving several links and inescapable inciting influences 

concerning and concentrating on modeling of our hypermodern times. 

To grasp this new role, we need to abstract and elevate the map of hypercultural images in accordance 

with mechanically produced ones, to revive the idea of the imagined community, and the French idea of 

the “imaginary”, as a constructed landscape of social and political form of tactical collective impacts 

and aspirations. In this regard, Sunless presents a composite of hybrid interrelations between various 

systems of persuasive communication inside the metropolis and places filmic practices within the 

infrastructure. Marker’s objective axiom is not only to measure the gulf and difference between various 

political cultures, but also to reflect and retrace the subtle ties and chains that bind the present to the 

past, to virtually show how the burden of the politics of the 1960s continues to determine the present. 

At stake is a constitutive cognizance between the globalisation of different cultures, the rising of new 

forms and doctrines of hyperculture and hypermodernity, as well as the mass migrations and 

dispersions that mark the present scanning moment of time as being distinct from the past. (Note 14) 

Following Marker’s polysemic signature and its expressive, almost psychopathological inscriptions by 

referring explicitly to the image-echo of the city, Tokyo is exposed as a delirious and socially distressed 

“reality of divergent appearances”, a dystopian 20th century equivalent of the ancient, primordial 

floating world of the Edo period. Marker insists on this specific complexity, engaging to fill the 

narrative, engraving, and morphing into metaphors, which find their substantially concrete and tangible 

embodiments in the shots of the many advertising signboards and placards of young Japanese 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

26 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

supermodels suspended in mid-air over the city, hanging from invisible wires and cables above the 

streetscape and railway lines which run through the city. The pictorially mustered, enthusiastic union of 

advertising and the mass media communication invades public space and private thought alike. Here 

the fine line between indifference and attentiveness is tested, as well as the temporality of perception: 

the omnipresence and iconicity of video and television screens rule the ‘city-image’ and decorate the 

department store walls, and the computer-generated images and huge advertising billboards and murals 

taken from the comic strip books hail to and prevail upon the passers-by, dwarfing them with their 

monumental scale. There is more than a suggestion in such narrative imagery of the way in which 

hypermodern city life acquires the character of a space of absorbing surveillance.  

The narrative can be seen as promoted of acting in similarly opening terms and theorems of perception, 

integrating, unifying, and assembling continuities and discontinuities through which the spectator’s 

gaze, its thoughtful and addressed attention is guided into processes and verifications that confirm and 

contest the shifting quantities of immersion and redesign from one stimulus to another. As a result, the 

enormous, elegant, and exquisite images are adorning the city’s billboards featuring a figurative, 

symmetrical style and formula of looking out of the posters, casting the eyes across the cityscape, 

“voyeurising the voyeurs”, as the film’s narrator confirms. These are sequences of psychological 

rhetoric, layers of visual action that are piled up and addressed to the audience. Faces are full of 

potential expression, as if waiting for possible solutions and outcomes that seem enigmatic and tuned 

with different structural and other details. In a similar, hypermodern vein, and as a part of decorative 

and contingent planning, Marker is pointing out to the general markings of erotically charged images of 

young women and comic-strip heroines, appearing on a marked scale, played upon, and inflated out of 

all proportions. They seem to desolately counterpoint the impersonality, constraint and strenuous 

conformity that reign over the street-life below. The artistically controlled vision reflects as though all 

these could be the newly acquired projections of repressed genealogy of inner desires.  

Marker addresses the contemporaneity and ingenuity of hypermodern perception and a theorem of 

attention, in the middle of which earlier precisely employed and recited continuums may have become 

significantly unbalanced. Marker orchestrates his generous professions around the order of representing 

an audiovisual, heterotopic scheme of the city. and in one of the most striking envisages, the reflections 

that are visibly composed of a wide array of moving figures in the subway are almost entirely absorbed 

within the giant billboard image of a fashion model. As to imply that these superimpositions create a 

strong intuition and doctrine of overlaid hypermodern technologies in the heart of Marker’s 

long-standing aspirations. Their partly discomposing balance of physical and social presence sharpens 

the edge of encounters. The shadowy figure over another image-formation seems to infuse and embody 

the forwardness of the other image just for a few seconds, which in this case seems by comparison to 

be enough to arouse the spectatorial, immediate psychic relevance. Attempts to control it, by creating 

dramatic looks and silently open gestures and faces that emphasise the stages of contemplation and 

reverie slowly but surely.  



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

27 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

In the hypermodern megalopolis, filmic existence, reality, and dreams are inextricable from each other, 

as representation becomes a way of determining the quintessence of reality. Following the sequence in 

which the cameraman (Hungarian fictive poet Sandór Krasna) scans Japanese late-night television with 

its accent on plethora of images of desire, horror and violence, the scene shifts to the subterranean 

tunnels that lead from the department store malls to the train stations. In this sequence, Marker resorts 

to the longstanding and important trope of the train, both as a metaphor for the cinematic apparatus and 

as a symbol of industrial progress. One can see an echo and an additional reference to Russian 

Kino-trains, invoked in the thirties by Alexander Medvedkin (1900-1989), the elusive filmmaker 

behind Marker’s films Le Train en marche (1971) and Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik 

1992). Marker’s prophetic references to Medvedkin are being discovered and confirmed at these 

instants by the changing roles of the image in these narratives. Yet, Marker’s attributed invocation of 

the metaphor of the train reinvents its nuances. Whilst, for the Soviet monteurs, the metaphor of the 

train was initially bound up with the image of the progression of history, for Marker, placed in the 

context of Tokyo’s cityscape, it becomes a metaphor for a society given over to fashions of pictorially 

conferred spectacle. According to an axiom by Nicholas Mirzoeff, visual culture is a provisional and 

constantly shifting view, not defined by a medium so much as by the interaction between viewers and 

viewed (1999, p. 13).  

Within the diegetic world of fictional plot, Krasna’s utterly fragmented voyage tackles many questions, 

referring to the historical layers of meanings. As the enunciator of Sunless continues: “More and more, 

my dreams find their settings in the department stores of Tokyo, the subterranean tunnels that extend 

beyond them and run parallel to the city. A face appears, disappears, a trace is found, is lost, all the 

folklore of dreams is so much in its place that the next day, when I am awake, I realise that I continue 

to seek in the basement labyrinth the presence concealed the night before. I begin to wonder if those 

dreams are really mine, or if they are part of a totality, of a gigantic collective dream of which the 

entirety of the city may be the projection. It might suffice to pick up any one of the telephones that are 

lying around to hear a familiar voice or the beating of a heart––Sei Shönagon’s for example. All the 

galleries lead to stations, the same companies own the stores and the railroads that bear their name, 

Keio, Odakyu, all those names of ports. The train inhabited by sleeping people with all the fragments of 

dreams, makes a single film of them, the ultimate film. The tickets from that automatic dispenser grant 

admission to the show.” 

The pictorially laden images accompanying the categorical commentary show people buying tickets for 

the subway, boarding train compartments, and once seated, drifting into sleep, a segment which 

self-reflexively recalls and brings full circle the journey into the city in the film’s opening moments. 

The dreamy architectural ambience continues as the sequence progresses, images of the passengers’ 

sleeping faces are allusively and dialectically intercut with images of the late-night television 

sequences replayed from the night before, connoting the way in which these images of desire and 

violence become imprinted and inscribed onto their subconscious thoughts and dreams. It is a 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

28 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

metaphorical way to describe the symbolic interaction between the media and the audience. The 

subway sequence is an evocative treatment of sleeping, dreaming, and waking as they relate to the 

experience of the spectator (Walsh, 1998, p. 13). It meticulously “pictorializes” the momentums when 

media affect us, are part of our dreams, and influence our thinking. It happens especially in seconds 

when faces are deliberated to illuminate and reflect the passing moments of continuous alternation 

rather than only a straight reaction to views ahead or inside the passengers’ minds. The expedition 

offers us not only an extraordinarily apt example of the film’s intricate use of montage to slip nimbly 

between the realms of desire and the everyday, dream and wakefulness, subjective and collective 

memory, but also an image of a world whose experience of the real is constantly and imperceptibly 

shifting between these categories. In a sublime way, and in the spirit of Gilles Lipovetsky’s theoretical 

forebodings, Chris Marker foresees the inward and external addresses of the physical and psychological 

shifts of emotional and affective self at curious seconds of time. 

Marker’s quest for the true, precise image is an on-going task, as such images are not often found, and 

when they are, they often come by surprise. Through this display, Marker’s hand-held camera seems to 

respond directly to the diegetic world (Branigan, 1992, p. 216). This could be even more developed in a 

swift-changing montage, Marker’s images are highly structured, and the atmospheric echo and logic of 

the narrative rhetoric is exclusively controlled. There are passages, such as the Tokyo subway sequence, 

that critically examine the subtleties and modifications of the structural cognizance of representational 

media to material reality, explicitly questioning the way in which our perception of the world is 

saturated by different forms of representational media. Convoluting this dictum still further, it echoes 

the precarious state of documentary filmmaking in a world that also seems mostly drenched with 

images and sounds, in which the function and kudos of each image and sound are not always so 

irrefutable. 

These similar questions had already been raised in the 1960s when Marker was producing his early 

films. Secondly, it has to do with his working methods and particularly the historical approach to 

filmmaking. The specific significance of his earlier films becomes clearer when we realise that a 

history of images and sounds, conceived of as the product of filmmaking practices, is rooted in 

sociohistorical and psycho-physiological intricacies, problematics, and contingencies of “classical 

modernity” (Lipovetsky). In this regard, Sunless constantly shifts its views between different levels of 

representation and different levels of impending reality, analysing the mediating role of representational 

media communication in our collective histories and personal memories. Throughout the film, the 

filmmaker gives examples of how the historical meaning of the inquiries into cityscape has changed 

over time. Likewise, Marker uses clever framing and editing figures to depict Krasna’s voyages around 

the globe. In Tokyo-images we see the spirit of the place where old and new customs and rituals are 

appearing as symmetrically closed entities. These practices can be distinctively classified into three 

different groups: the first is performed through short remarks to the enunciator’s own memory places, 

the second is the documentary coverage of the cityscape, and the third refers to the more global view 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

29 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

and further floundering of his ruminations. 

 

4. Stylized Entities  

In this sense, it is a hypermodern working method and theorem, allowing the employment of different 

motifs in connection to the expressed and prosaic recording of various phenomena. Every once in a 

while, the narrative seems to be asking about the point and value of editing in the middle of things and 

matters that reflect to themselves. This self-reflexivity is typical for the cineaste, presenting a mode of 

cinema that is open for new developments and constructive operations which start from the essence of 

the medium. It may be partly spontaneous. Partly mediated action of reaching the dissolved goals of 

affection. (Note 15) Marker’s method is never simple or one-sided but more like a painterly sketch, 

seized on open possibilities to work out a genuine and confident film structure based on artistically 

influenced impressions and their possible outcomes as a combination of looks, gestures, movements, 

and other similar views and effects. The enunciator’s imagistic field of perception works as a gaze at 

the world, capturing the manifestly ordered sense of time at that specific scanning moment of historical 

precariousness that may be read as an audiovisual metacommentary of matters. (Note 16) The camera 

with its painterly flavour influences the form of sensitive realism lined up with purist aesthetic and 

stylised features. Yet, if at times Marker presents a picture of the city as overcrowded, megalomaniac, 

and inhuman, he qualifies this by drawing explicit attention to other subtler sides of the city, to the 

austere beauty of the diffused, photographic light in January, and especially to the particularity of the 

scattering of faces, subjective moods and the lives of the twelve million or so inhabitants of the city, “as 

different and precise as groups of instruments”, or to the ways in which the patterns of everyday 

existence restructure and reclaim the cityscape: the way, for example, that, after dark, the impersonality 

of the city by day gives way to the transformation of the city into a series of villages. Marker is also 

sensitive to the atmospheric, marginal life of the city, to all that disrupts its rational functioning. At the 

commencement of the film, a homeless alcoholic in a run-down quarter of the Tokyo suburbs assumes 

the role of a policeman directing the traffic from the middle of a busy junction. In an added sequence, 

the poorest of the Tokyo poor park themselves in front of television screens in chic department stores to 

watch the Sumo contests. 

As precisely defined by Marker, Sunlessl derives its title from a six-part song cycle by Russian 

composer Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881). Marker’s provisional technique of expression features 

similarities with Mussorgsky’s emphasis. The last of the songs in this cycle is entitled Sur le fleuve, and 

it is heard in the film. Marker’s thematic leitmotif tended to follow the song cycle for dramatic effects 

and in attention with his narrative progression. In a similar equation, Marker establishes a virtual 

dialogism between the film and the song cycle, expressing through this method and doctrine of design 

his “hypermodern connection” (Lipovetsky) between the two. This all is done with utmost sensuality 

and poetic expressiveness that controls the movements and acts of Sunlessl. The hypermodern 

imagination is at its best in Marker’s oeuvre, controlling most aspects of narration and working in 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

30 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

conjunction with the overall conception and stylistic framework of narration, and other main trends of 

direction with its sublime and melancholic but nevertheless demanding critical undertones.  

The hypermodern form of Sunless, its provisional continuity and polyphonic montage combine 

hand-held images shot in various places around the world. It contains a rapid, patchwork montage of 

privileged places, positions, and alleged settings. Some images are accompanied by commentary, 

sounds and music, and Chris Marker alternately reinforces and gradually intensifies the focal points of 

audiovisual montage in representing the communication technology through mediatic implements and 

transcriptions. The perpetually enhanced humanity of Marker is contained in the intertextual metaphoric 

dialogue and debate between images and sounds, therefore creating an echo and needed reflection of 

the constructed affinity of hypermodern thinking. The fragmentary nature of narration contributes to 

this perspective, and the main settings of the documentary support this reading of matters with some 

crucial implications. The elusive, and sometimes quaint patterns of montage are related to the overall 

philosophy of the work, and the audience perceives this bit by bit. Through Marker’s monumental 

practice, the spectators are continually aware of the proceedings at the level of the productive process. 

The integral and poignant prefilmic montage of Sunlessl consists of composite sources meticulously 

underpinning and recalling the journeys depicted in the film. The wholeness is a hypermodern 

metacommentary of immersive and partly acousmatic resounding lessons on the plight of human 

beings and their situation in the world filled with the tangible manifestations of industrial and cerebral 

currents. 

 

5. The Forms of Hypermodern Journey 

The reconnection of images and principally their interdependence creates minutes of spatial and 

temporal modifications that grow in significance in the light of the tightly coded and hierarchically 

ordered Japanese society. The circulation of tropes and concepts between these sketched 

representations by Marker does not, however, infer causally interactive relationships between the 

distinctive cultural realm of contingency. More or less, the narrative interacts and functions with the 

photographic and pictorial continuums and complements, and the spectator is assailed by a multiplicity 

of techniques that interrupt and disconnect time and give space and causality an unstable existence. 

These are necessary but not sufficient conditions for our perceptual and reticent consciousness to be 

present in these sections when Marker attacks our comprehension of images and sounds and their 

tightly embodied infiltrations. From the very commencement, the narrative consistently emphasises 

that the moving images and sounds on the screen can have a specific affectionate as elaborate regimes 

of simulation of the depicted “reality”. The hypermodern meditative lexicon upon the metropolis of 

Tokyo becomes continually interwoven with a series of commentaries that are related to questions on 

the economic position of Japan, its politically charged and, at some passing moments, naive landscape, 

and its difficult relations to other continents. One of the reasons why Marker obsessively and 

compulsively returns to Japan is that the country has arguably become the leading manufacturer of the 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

31 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

new technologies that are transforming our experience of the world. And the ingenuity of the 

experience, concerned with the past and the present, is increasingly dissolved and complex.  

The present is absorbing the attributes of the past and maybe even the future. In other words, the 

fascination of Japan is the way the impact of new audiovisual technologies and digital culture has not 

simply eclipsed previous long-standing cultural customs but increased the mediated interaction and 

mutual exchange between the pre-existent cultural forms, thereby imbuing a peculiar, elevating, and 

synthetic cognizance between modernisation and the perpetuation of various traditional forms. In this 

conceptualization, modernity, wherever it appears, does not occur without a shattering of belief, or 

without a discovery of the lack of reality––an epiphanic rediscovery linked to other realities. (Note 17) 

Marker’s shots are pictorially-decorated entities, laced with a specific, almost unfettered 

phenomenological sensation of the ontology of time’s dimensions. For Marker it is typical to 

continually return to various sacred rituals that perpetuate the practices and historical dimensions of the 

past. But in addition to a number of such representations, Marker points out the rapid substitutions that 

have taken place in recent Japanese history, and he investigates the cultural mediation and forms of 

modern Japan to see the scattered vibrations, concrete observations, and the symptomatic patterns of 

the eradicated past. (Note 18)  

Post- and hypermodern discourse of Japanese culture signifies an era in which pictoriality and the 

visualising of things that are not necessarily visual have accelerated so dramatically that the global 

circulation of images has become an end, a dictum of itself, specifically through the Internet and other 

digital formations. Marker’s description in Lettrè de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia) of Siberia as a land of 

contradictions situated between the Middle Ages and the 21st century might endow a fitting epigraph 

for the analysis of his portrayal of Japan in Sunlessl. These observations about Japan lead on to a 

probing examination of the question of the indispensable acknowledgement between the “developing 

Third World” and the West. In Marker’s hands Japanese visual culture is a fractal network, permeated 

with signs and emblems from all over the globe. Such a glowing network has key points of interface 

and interaction that have more than ordinary complexity and importance. With Marker the potentiality 

to be intentionally polemical to visualise a culture or society almost becomes synonymous with 

understanding it. Paying attention to the coexistence of vastly different experiences of modernity within 

the global economy therefore allows us to glimpse and comprehend the structural affinity of allegedly 

genuine, authentic manifestations, apparitions, symmetries, and invocations of the narrative in this 

respect. In the alternation and rapid inter- and crosscutting of images of the highly technological and 

affluent society of contemporary Japan with images of the rural poor of Africa, an elaborated disparity 

is drawn between the processes of modernisation in Japan and a way of life that involves a daily 

struggle for survival. 

 

6. Hypermodern Sensibility 

As we make observations, these diametrical disparities are not only registered as economic divisions, 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

32 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

but also imply a different experience of the temporal and nature. Marker is keen to undercut any 

sentimentalisation of the rural existence of the “Third World” – a professed vision which is obliquely 

referenced during the film by way of a succession of images of monuments to Rousseau, his chateau, 

and its grounds. Instead, he pictorializes its hardships and local struggles as a form of existence almost 

forgotten by the West. Marker is concerned, however, to show not only the separation of the “first” and 

“third worlds”, but also the delicate ties that bind such disparate places together. For, in the 

post-modern logic, few borders remain intact. This insistent theme unfolds during the narrative, 

initially through images of displacement. Images of “exoticism”, indicative of a prior wave of 

colonialism, are transferred to Europe (i.e., the narrator even comments on two occasions about the 

emus that live in Ile-de-France, and footage of them recurs on a few occasions). Similarly, elements of 

European Kitsch and remnants of European culture are shown to pervade Asia and Africa. 

Aphoristically, the permeability of the boundaries is made more explicit in a sequence in which the 

cameraman comments on a shortwave radio announcement projected to Tokyo that is picked up on 

Cape Verde Island.  

As a hypermodern documentary and explicitly open axiom, Sunlessl is a key work among Chris 

Marker’s cinematic essays. It comprises a hypermodern replication and an extent to which it portrays 

itself as a strange planet among other documentaries. It looks like an elusive phenomenon that 

combines classic knowledge, formal beauty and a more ingenious, albeit stylistic conceits and 

modulations of poetry. It touches the embedded human soul and its flow in a specific way, and it is a 

rare work since its global reach and efficacy is so genuine, as well as its intuitively demarcated 

ambience. In establishing a specific relation between memory and history, the film simultaneously 

postulates that memory is constantly rewritten in the same way as history. It is a cognitive attribution of 

existence that intermittently reflects the hypermodern lexicon very eloquently, allowing a 

phenomenological substance that is particularly prominent in advocating an alleged set of interlocking 

similitudes that function as verified conditions of representation in Marker’s oeuvre. This could be even 

more known and pronounced when a hypermodern parable might be embedded in a mass of various 

theoretical and practical contexts related to filmmaking processes, the discursive and figural elements 

of it can be surprisingly fluid and absorptive. Furthermore, a similar account of the traces of 

hypermodern, redolent sensibility can create and enrich narrative modes that are supplemented by 

fictional strategies and narrative patterns, playing a constitutive contingency in the gradual emergence 

and formulation of the canon of hypermodern documentary discourse. Within it, the modes of 

representation can be read as an allocated invocation and embodiment of various outcomes that are 

metaphysical and far-reaching as themselves. The variations of this mode can be unexpected in their 

dimensions, emphasising the figurative pluralities of identity, constitutive of hypermodern theorisation 

and the adequately poetic realism of intense filmic medialect. As understood, this highly complex 

exchange of influences implies a complicity of readings and strategies of display. 

“Time passes, and the present is in some sense unique.”  



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

33 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

Robin Le Poidevin (Note 19) 

Our understanding of the past is therefore only the sum of representations that can be made of it at any 

one moment perpetually in time. Yet, the problem is significantly deeper than in a self-conscious 

documentary of the limits of historical recuperation. The same strategy can be observed from various 

points of view.  

As Maureen Turin maintained already in 1989: 

Filmic treatment of temporality and memory might inspire scientific inquiry or it might simply run 

parallel to it; in few cases historically can film artists be said to be directly schooled in their filmic 

research by scholarly writings – though, as we saw, the twenties avant-garde is one moment where 

some evidence of intellectual cross-fertilization is evident. (1989, p. 206) 

In a similar continuation and exploration of other findings, we can see how the conundrum of historical 

interpretation is also scientifically essential and consequential, and bound up with the experience and 

rearticulation of temporality and its ramifications. Memory and time are in intimate connection with 

each other. This dialogic interplay and implied theory of nearness mean that, for instance, history can 

be caught in a double bind; if what the present understands about the past is never simply and 

straightforwardly the past as it was, it is equally true that our understanding of the present is always 

refracted through our imperfect recollection of the past. This sounds like a metacinematic commentary, 

in which a further implication is that past and present are ultimately inseparable, for the present 

perennially and discreetly inhabits our perception of the past and the past our perception of the present. 

These entangled explanatory forces can be therefore ascribed as elementary aspects of a partial 

codification of our existence. According to this planned envision, we are ultimately unable to 

disentangle what we project back onto the past from the past itself, for we are incapable of detaching 

ourselves fully from the present. Our inability to stand ‘outside of history’ means that we are daringly 

ill-equipped to judge whether there is an underlying order to the apparent sense of randomness and 

chaos of historical events, because the order of history - if, indeed, it is conceivable - must exist beyond 

the limits of our perception, and thus beyond the reach of our understanding. This prevalent 

transcription affirms that the enunciated problems of history thus become enmeshed in a series of 

conundrums of perspective. The fact that the observation of history is made from a vantage point within 

history relates the knowledge that it seeks to come up with the world, and thus undermines its claims to 

objective neutrality or more secure foundations on which it is based. 

But these films can contradict the suspicion that the convergence of experimental aesthetics and 

nonfiction cinema threaten the referential quality of documentary filmmaking. They show, instead, that 

this subjective approach to nonfictional presentation involves dialogue with the historical world, a 

productive exchange between the filmmakers and their subject matter.  

Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro
 
(Note 20) 

In Marker’s work, there is a straight link to the form of so-called essay film. The label ‘Cinematic 

Essay’ is encountered with an increasing frequency in scholarly act of writings on the cinema, owing to 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

34 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

the recent proliferation of personal, epistephilic, reflexive, and subjective documentaries and short films. 

It comprises a highly stylised mode of audio-visual production that can be called cinematic or 

audiovisual essay, and this form has existed and in recent years and reappropriated within the disciplines 

of film and fine art. It has also been called as filmed philosophy, and these essayistic connections include 

a wide variety of approaches, starting from a filmic genre which originates in the 1920s, and has 

increasingly come to be conceded as a distinguishable and independent branch of international cinema. It 

has a recognisable authorial presence and an impressive voice that has been notified as “overtly personal, 

in-depth, thought-provoking reflection” (Rascaroli, 2009, p. 33). We can see the cinematic essay form as 

a facilitator of a filmic hybrid that mixes diverse documentary and fiction material substrates to produce 

something unique and intellectually satisfying, an intermediate space in harnessing the cognitive instinct 

of the word. The filmmakers who use this approach, arrange all kinds of audiovisual tools according to 

their own conceptions that cross usual discursive boundaries and create a subjectivity of form and content. 

(Note 21) The narrative trajectory that they follow can consist of individual and collective accounts, 

personal memories and historical sources of affection and further reflection. Producers of audio-visual 

essays include not only feature filmmakers, documentarists, and avant-garde filmmakers, but also artists 

who produce installations for gallery and museum display. 

It may suffice to point out that filmic essay has its roots in the literary essay that goes back to the times of 

Michel de Montaigne, the French writer who produced his Essais in 1580 and this etymology is 

significant since it points to the experimental nature of the semantics of essay-writing, involving already 

than a nuanced and deliberate attempt to try something totally new. This forms an operation of 

intellectual cognition, meaning productive thinking that is characterised by the interplay between the free 

interaction of forces within the field and the solidified entities that persist as invariants in changing 

contexts (Arnheim, 1969, p. 235). At best, this sort of information producing can actively enhance 

palimpsest knowledge in a passing situation where the audiovisual world of happenings is dispersed in 

infinite complexity, a flux of constantly enhanced intentions which must be organised by our minds, and 

this organisation and vocalisation of the audiovisual world happens also in the phenomenological and 

labyrinthine structure of perception itself. In this sense, intellectual cognition can achieve something that, 

for instance, dreams and paintings do not, since it can combine different and separate levels of abstraction 

in one sensory occasion, it can connect specific levels of thought without an apprehension of letting them 

blur each other. This is related to the way how the human mind operates whether intuitively or cerebrally 

coordinating the products of ambiguously interacting forces and dismantling the simultaneity of the 

strategy of spatial structures. This all stresses the way how the documentary filmmaker selects the 

significant properties of the product in question and modifies the dynamic components of the work to 

arouse the perceptual evocation among the audience. 

All media of representation can rely on isomorphic and on non-isomorphic references…in the visual arts 

or in music, for example, strictly non-isomorphic references are exceedingly rare…a continuous gamut 

of shapes leads from the least to the most isomorphic media; it includes such intermediate features as 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

35 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

onomatopoetic speech sounds, ideographs, allegories and other conventional symbols.  

Rudolf Arnheim (1969, p. 251). 

With an expressly reliable assertion, Rascaroli is actually following these lines with her declaration that 

exposes the essay film as ‘a cinema in the first person, a cinema of thought, of investigation, of 

intellectual searching, of self-reflection (2009: digital age, the blend of individual and collective 

aspirations, and the emphasis on self-documentation. Audiovisual essays complicate the elements of 

representation. The more general shift away from literacy toward visual and audiovisual culture in the 

late 20th century 185). The subjectivity of cinematic essay affects both form and content and is also 

affected by the has also spurred on production within this scope of medium. Modes of sketched 

representation are in line with these thoughts forming an intersection of personal accounts and subjective 

and socio-historical thematic, relying on cerebral currents and conscious artistic innovation. By 

examining and evaluating previous and currently existing definitions of essay form, we can approach and 

develop a vivid theory of the essay film. Several scholarly contributions to this field do exist and they 

promote the intention that the definition of essay film is instantly significant. The general outlining of the 

current situation emphasises its form as hybrid and focuses on its ability to blur and overstep boundaries. 

 

Notes 

Note 1. Sapir, Edward (1931) “Conceptual Categories of Primitive Language”, Science.  

Note 2. Henri Thulié wrote about the interior as follows: The interior is the intimate part of life, there 

one deposits all one’s hypocrisies; like clothing, little by little it takes on the inflections of the body, it 

betrays all it habits, ne can guess at a man by seeing his rooms. The choice of furniture, colours, of a 

thousand little nothings spread all about are traitors which recount tendencies, meannesses, and secret 

vices. Frequently, in describing an interior, one recount the private life of an individual or of a family. 

L’intérieur c’est l’intimité de la vie, on dépose chez soi toutes ses hypocrisies; comme le costume il 

prend peu à peu toutes les inflexions les corps, trahit toutes ces habitudes, on peut deviner un homme 

en voyant sa chamber. Le choix des meubles, des couleurs, des mille petit riens qui traînent partout sont 

des traîtres qui racontent les tendances, les mesquineries, les vices secrets. En décrivant un intérieur, on 

raconte souvent la vie privée d’un individu ou d’une famille. 

Thulié, Henri (1857) ‘Du Roman: La Description,’ Réalisme, no. 4, 38. Reprinted in Lewis, Mary 

Tompkins (ed.) (2007) Critical Readings in Impressionism & Post-Impressionism: An Anthology. 

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 172-3. 

Note 3. Pour bien comprendre une physionomie, il faut rendre l’impression qu’on a éprouvée en la 

voyant. Il y a toujours des traits saillants dans le visage et dans le costume qui frappent des primes aux 

abords. Ibid.  

Note 4. There has been a lot of controversy around these issues. For the controversy, see more about 

Gestalt-criticism in Friedenberg & Silverman (2006, pp. 81-82). 

Note 5. A wider approach to these matters can be found in Anderson, John, Robert (1980) Documentary 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

36 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

Psychology and Its Implications. San Francisco: Freeman; Anderson, Joseph, D. (1996) The Reality of 

Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press; 

Cummins, Robert (1983) The Nature of Psychological Explanation. Cambridge: The MIT Press; 

Dennett, Daniel (1969) Content and Consciousness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Eco, Umberto 

(1997) Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition. New York: Harcourt; Ehrenzweig, 

Anton (1993) The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley and 

Los Angeles: University of California Press; Flanagan, Owen (1984) The Science of the Mind. 

Cambridge: The MIT Press; Gardner, Howard (1985) The Mind’s New Science: A History of the 

Documentary Revolution. New York: Basic Books; Gombrich, Ernst, H. (1969) Art and Illusion. 

Princeton: Princeton University Press; Haugeland, John (1985) Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. 

Cambridge: The MIT Press: Jackendoff, Ray (1987) Consciousness and the Computational Mind. 

Cambridge: The MIT Press. These books are comparable studies on art, cognition, psychology and 

perspectives of the mind and consciousness, as well as scientific and historical outlines around these 

matters. 

Note 6. See further in Landsberg, Alison (2009) Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification. 

International Journal of Politics and Culture. (PDF) Academia.edu. In her innovative essay, she links 

memory questions together with, for instance, the concept of empathy, and succeeds in establishing an 

important role to the interconnections between them. Furthermore, see reference 63. 

Note 7. As a consequence, general questions of the forms of art and their overlapping dimensions will 

also clear symmetrical inferences, and aspire to define the continuities between different forms of 

symmetry and balance in documentary studies, especially the larger connections and linkages between 

painting, architecture, photography, and film.  

Note 8. We can draw attention to these possibilities of rewriting the history of documentary cinema 

with an adopted doubt concerning the limits and fallacies of historical representation.  

Note 9. A structurally similar interaction is emphasised and appropriated in Johan van der Keuken’s 

documentary Amsterdam Global Village (1996). In addition to narrative patterns and rhetorical figures, 

van der Keuken’s iconographic approach circulates the dramatic and cinematic forms and enactments 

towards an elaborately choreographed performance, in which the Dutch cineaste emphasises the 

dialectic of camerawork and montage, which happens not only within single shots, or between them, 

but also between the audiovisual forms and details of narration and their overall context. Through this 

approach one can think that relentless camerawork and then a possible editing are somehow inseparable 

entities in order to arrange the relations between images and sounds. On a larger cognitive level, it 

means that both film and media are bound up with finding ways to order. Re-order and re-write actual 

and historical elements at display acknowledging the constructive and reciprocal processes of 

interaction between media and culture, providing insights into the visions that foresee the contingent 

realization and appropriation of fundamental discourses among documentaries. Van der Keuken’s 

uplifting attitude narrows the one with the early filmmakers’ bottomless curiosity and preference 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

37 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

without prejudices including a genuine exaltation towards filmmaking. Van der Keuken’s disciplined 

philosophy of audiovisuality is not narrowly orchestrated but mostly associational, containing a 

collection of hypermodern advanced realism – a specific sensitivity to camera’s ability to produce 

audiovisual memories and pieces of remembrance. 

Note 10. See, for instance, Metz, Christian (1985) ‘Aural Objects’ in Weis, Elizabeth and John Belton 

(eds.) Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 158-160. 

Note 11. See Wahlberg (2008), 40-1. Our audiovisual perception is a perspective through which we can 

look at films from our current viewpoint. Our relation to history becomes a contemplation, a meditative 

practice that gives observational possibilities to comprehend and re-interpret cinematic views and 

visionary recitations. 

Note 12. Useful parameters of these connections are laid out in Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright 

(2001) Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Note 13. This notion aligns with the Gestalt-approach of deciding whether the effect has fulfilled all its 

promises. 

Note 14. In film theory, Temenuga Trifonova has made a remark concerning ‘hyperlink cinema’, which 

brings together ‘multiple protagonists from different social classes, ethnic or racial groups, and nations. 

This all simply reflects the contradictory nature of globalization’. It appears as a form of 

hyper-associational cinema, ‘a reflection of an increased awareness of the intensification of time and 

space under the conditions of globalization.’ These are signs and forms of temporal and spatial 

restructuring that happens throughout the whole architecture of communication. See, Trifonova, 

Temenuga (2009) European Film Theory. New York and London: Routledge, 284. 

Note 15. “Prosthetic memories” are not the products of lived experiences, but are derived from 

engagement with a mediated representation, such as a film or an experiential museum, and like an 

artificial limb, they are actually worn on the body; these are sensuous memories produced by an 

experience of mass-mediated representations. Their ability to circulate widely is occasioned by their 

commodified form. It is precisely the commodified nature of mass cultural representations that makes 

them so widely available to people who live in different places and hail from different backgrounds, 

races, and classes, and that ultimately precludes them from being the private property of a particular 

group. Finally, I call these memories prosthetic to underscore their usefulness. Because they feel real, 

they help condition how a person thinks about the world and might be instrumental in articulating an 

ethical relation to the other. Prosthetic memories emerge at the interface between a person and a 

historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or museum. In this 

moment of contact, an experience occurs through which a person sutures him or herself into a larger 

historical narrative. In this process, the person does not simply learn about the past intellectually, but 

takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event.” See Landsberg, Alison /2018) 

‘Prosthetic memory: the ethics and politics of memory in an age of mass culture’, in Memory and 

popular film, edited by Paul Grainge. Manchester University Press. 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc          Advances in Social Science and Culture               Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023 

38 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526137531.00014 Online Publication Date: 30 Jul 2018 

Note 16. It is something to be found also in Agnés Varda’s documentaries.  

Note 17. For a seminal analysis that combines cultural and historical aspects of postmodernism, see 

Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1993) The Postmodern Explained. Minnes